Kobza's Komments

At Convention in February I attended a session presented by Rocky View Schools titled Combating Student Absenteeism: Enhancing Systems to Improve Educational Outcomes. It was of particular interest to me as we had recently had conversations about attendance at our Learning Leadership meetings. At this session I learned about their Attendance Innovation Campaign and the practices they undertook to improve attendance at pilot schools and across their division. Their campaign focused on three main areas:  Educate, Empower, and Eliminate. You may have noticed over the past month a variety of messages from the school on Facebook and Remind as our Education Campaign on attendance kicked off.

Attendance is critical for success in school.  Students who attend under 90% are considered to be chronically absent.  While that may seem to be high, it means that with a school year of 180 days, students should miss no more than 18 days which equals out to 2 days per month.  Missing this many days puts student at risk of negative academic, economic, mental health and legal outcomes. Here are some attendance facts from the presentation by Rocky View Schools:

• Absences are a problem if they are excused or unexcused.
• Sporadic and consecutive absences negatively impact learning.
• Parents signing off on school absences does not minimize the impact.
• Attendance patterns matter in all grades, including Kindergarten.
• Children find it difficult to catch up on missed work.
• Parents underestimate their child’s absences by 50%.

The second phase of the attendance campaign is Empower and we have been working through the data using PowerSchool to find out what the attendance trends are for FLVT. What are the attendance facts for our school community?  One piece of data we have access to shows the attendance rate for each day of the week. The following chart illustrates the attendance rate for the students from September to March for all students. It is interesting to note the lower attendance rate for Friday and how close it is to being under 90%. A goal for the next couple of months would be to try to bring the Friday attendance rate a little closer to the rest of the averages

Another piece of data shows student attendance broken down into percentages. The chart below summarizes attendance trends for this school year up to the end of March.  I think it is great to celebrate that 460 or 85% of our students are on track to be at or above the 90% attendance rate.

We still have work to do as 83 or 15% of our students are at risk for negative outcomes. As a result, we are currently piloting phase three Eliminate with a small group of students.  We have developed plans to target individual students and identify their attendance barriers. At our PD Day in April, we will be looking at developing an recognition program for the coming school year. We all want our students to be successful which goes hand in hand with good attendance. Let’s finish the year strong and aim for at least 90% attendance after the Easter break. 

Attendance Facts courtesy of Attendance Works